Today, computing devices such as personal computers, laptop computers, personal digital assistants, mobile devices, tablets, cell-phones, etc., are routinely used at work, home, and everywhere in-between. Computing devices advantageously enable the use of application specific software, file sharing, the creation of electronic documents, and electronic communication and commerce through the Internet and other computer networks. Typically, each computing device has a storage peripheral such as a disk drive and/or accesses data that is stored somewhere by a disk drive. A huge market exists for disk drives for computing devices such as server computers, desktop computers, laptop computers, mobile computers, mobile devices, etc.
Disk drives typically comprise a disk and a head connected to a distal end of an actuator arm which is rotated by a pivot by a voice coil motor (VCM) to position the head radially over the disk. The disk typically comprises a plurality of radially spaced, concentric tracks for recording user data sectors and servo sectors. The servo sectors typically comprise head positioning information (e.g., a track address) which is read by the head and processed by a servo control system to control the velocity of the actuator arm as it seeks from track to track. Data is typically written to the disk by modulating a write current in an inductive coil to record magnetic transitions onto the disk surface. During readback, the magnetic transitions are sensed by a read element (e.g., a magnetoresistive element) and the resulting read signal demodulated by a suitable read channel.
To be competitive in the disk drive market, a disk drive should be relatively inexpensive and should embody a design that is adaptive for low-cost mass production, while at the same time provide high data storage capacity and provide rapid access to data. Satisfying these competing restraints of low-cost, high data storage capacity, rapid access to data and improved reliability requires innovation in each of the numerous components of the disk drive, methods of assembly, and in testing.
A wide variety of different types of disk drives having different numbers of heads and disks, and different amounts of storage capacity, are manufactured and provided to disk drive purchasers to satisfy their storage needs. It is important to maintain targeted seek time performance levels for each type of disk drive manufactured to satisfy the needs of the disk drive purchasers.
Unfortunately, each type of disk drive having a particular storage capacity and a particular number of heads and disks presently requires optimized tunings to meet the targeted seek time performance levels to satisfy the disk drive purchaser's requests. This significantly increases the amount of work load and costs to disk drive manufacturers to manufacture these different types of disk drives.